The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs Read online

  That dirty work, for both abelisaurids and carcharodontosaurids, was catching and chomping the other dinosaurs they lived with, particularly the plant-eaters. Some of them were similar to northern species—for example, some duck-billed dinosaurs have been found in Argentina. But for the most part, it was a different bunch of herbivores down south. There were no pulsating herds of ceratopsians like Triceratops, and no dome-headed pachycephalosaurs. There were, however, sauropods. Hordes of them. T. rex didn’t chase down any of these long-necked titans up in ancient Montana, as sauropods seemed to have disappeared from most of North America some time during the middle part of the Cretaceous (although they still did frequent the southern reaches of the continent). Not so in Brazil or the other austral lands. There sauropods remained the primary large-bodied plant-eaters, right up to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs.

  It was one particular type of sauropod that spread across the southlands. The halcyon days of the Jurassic were far gone, and no longer did Brachiosaurus, Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, and their ilk crowd together in the same ecosystems, finely dividing the niches between them with their distinctive teeth, necks, and feeding styles. What was left at the end of the Cretaceous was a more restricted roster of sauropods, a subgroup called the titanosaurs. Some were truly Biblical in proportions—like Dreadnoughtus from Argentina or Austroposeidon, described by Felipe the oilman and his colleagues from a series of vertebrae—each one the size of a bathtub—found directly south of Goiás in São Paulo State. It’s the largest dinosaur ever found in Brazil, and probably stretched about eighty feet (twenty-five meters) from snout to tail. It strains the senses to envision what it must have weighed, but probably somewhere in the ballpark of twenty to thirty tons, maybe much more.

  Other late-surviving southern titanosaurs—from Brazil and elsewhere—were considerably smaller. The so-called aeolosaurins were modest creatures, at least as sauropods go, with some of the better-known species, like Rinconsaurus, at a mere four tons and thirty-six feet (eleven meters) long. Another subgroup, called saltasaurids, were of the same general size, and they protected themselves from the hungry abelisaurids and carcharodontosaurs with a patchwork of armor plates implanted in their skin.

  We also know that there were some smaller theropods but nothing like the panoply of small to midsize carnivores and omnivores in North America. Maybe, you could argue, we just haven’t found their small and delicate bones yet, but that’s not a very satisfying explanation, because there are many skeletons of similar-size animals found in Brazil, but they are crocodiles, not theropods. Some of them were fairly standard water dwellers that probably wouldn’t have competed very much with dinosaurs, but others were bizarre animals adapted for living on the land, so unlike today’s crocs. Baurusuchus was a long-legged, doglike pursuit predator. Mariliasuchus had teeth that looked like the incisors, canines, and molars of mammals, which it probably used like pigs to eat a smorgasbord omnivorous diet. Armadillosuchus was a burrower with bands of flexible body armor, and it may have been able to roll up in the style of an armadillo, hence its name. None of these animals lived in North America, as far as we know. It seems that, in Brazil and throughout the Southern Hemisphere, these crocodiles were filling ecological niches held by dinosaurs in other parts of the world.

  Carcharodontosaurs and abelisaurids instead of tyrannosaurs, sauropods instead of ceratopsians, swarms of crocs instead of raptors, oviraptorosaurs, and other small theropods. The north and the south were different from each other during those waning years of the Cretaceous, that much is certain. But these big continental areas were downright normal—boring, even—compared to what was going on at the same time in the middle of the Atlantic, where some of the weirdest dinosaurs to ever evolve were hopping around the flooded remnants of Europe.

  OF ALL THE people who have ever studied dinosaurs, collected dinosaur bones, or even thought about dinosaurs in any serious way, there’s never been anybody quite like Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás.

  Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás, I should say, because this man was literally an aristocrat who dug up dinosaur bones. He seems like the invention of a mad novelist, a character so outlandish, so ridiculous, that he must be a trick of fiction. But he was very real—a flamboyant dandy and a tragic genius, whose exploits hunting dinosaurs in Transylvania were brief respites from the insanity of the rest of his life. Dracula, in all seriousness, has nothing on the Dinosaur Baron.

  Nopcsa was born in 1877 to a noble family in the gentle hills of Transylvania, in what is now Romania but was then on the fringes of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire. He spoke several languages at home, and they instilled within him an urge to wander. He also had urges of another kind, and when he was in his twenties, he became the lover of a Transylvanian count, an older man who regaled him with tales of a hidden kingdom of mountains to the south, where tribesmen wore dapper costumes, brandished long swords, and spoke in an indecipherable tongue. The local mountain men called their homeland Shqipëri. We know it today as Albania, but then it was a backwater on the southern edge of Europe, occupied for centuries by another great empire, the Ottoman.

  The baron decided to check it out for himself. He headed south, through the borderlands that separated two empires, and when he arrived in Albania, he was welcomed with a gunshot, which sliced through his hat and narrowly missed his skull. Undeterred, he proceeded to cross much of the country on foot. He picked up the language, grew his hair long, started dressing like the natives, and earned the respect of the insular tribes nestled among the mountain peaks. But the tribesmen might not have been so welcoming if they’d known the truth: Nopcsa was a spy. He was being paid by the Austro-Hungarian government to provide intelligence on their Ottoman neighbors, a mission that became even more critical—and dangerous—as the empires collapsed and the map of Europe was redrawn in the hellfires of World War I.

  That’s not to say that the baron was merely a mercenary. He was enamored of Albania—obsessed, really. He became one of Europe’s leading experts on Albanian culture and came to truly love its people—one in particular. Nopcsa fell for a young man from a sheepherding village in the high mountains. This man—Bajazid Elmaz Doda—nominally became Nopcsa’s secretary, but he was so much more, although it wasn’t spoken about so openly in those less accepting times. The two lovers would remain together for nearly three decades, enduring the leers of their peers, surviving the disintegration of their respective empires, traveling Europe by motorcycle (Nopcsa on the bike, Doda in a sidecar). Doda was by Nopcsa’s side when, in the chaos before the Great War, the baron plotted an insurgency of mountain men against the Turks—even smuggling in firearms to build an arsenal—and then later tried to install himself as king of Albania. Both schemes failed, so Nopcsa turned to other pursuits.

  As it turned out, that would be dinosaurs.

  In fact, Nopcsa became interested in dinosaurs before he knew anything of Albania, before he met Doda. When he was eighteen, his sister picked up a mangled skull on the family estate. The bones had turned to stone, and it didn’t look like any animal the young baron had ever seen scurrying or soaring across his stately grounds. He brought it with him when he started university in Vienna later that year, and upon showing it to one of his geology instructors, he was told to go find more. And so he did, obsessively exploring the fields, hills, and riverbeds of the land he would later inherit, on foot and horseback. Four years later, a blueblood in name but still just a student, he stood up in front of the learned men of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and announced what he had been up to and what he had found: a whole ecosystem of strange dinosaurs.

  Nopcsa continued to collect Transylvanian dinosaurs for much of the rest of his life, taking breaks here and there when his services were needed in Albania. He studied them, too, and in doing so was one of the first people who made any attempt to grasp what dinosaurs were like as real animals, not simply bones to be classified. He had a genius when it came to interpreting fossils, and it didn’t take him ver
y long to notice that something was odd about the bones he was finding on his estate. He could tell that they belonged to groups that were common in other parts of the world—a new species that he named Telmatosaurus was a duckbill, a long-necked critter called Magyarosaurus was a sauropod, and he also found the bones of armored dinosaurs. However, they were smaller than their mainland relatives, in some cases, astoundingly so; while its cousins were shaking the Earth with their thirty-ton frames in Brazil, Magyarosaurus was barely the size of a cow. At first Nopcsa thought the bones belonged to juveniles, but when he put them under a microscope, he realized that they had the characteristic textures of adults. There was only one suitable explanation: these Transylvanian dinosaurs were miniatures.

  This raised an obvious question: why were they so tiny? Nopcsa had an idea. Along with his expertise in espionage, linguistics, cultural anthropology, paleontology, motorbiking, and general scheming, the baron was also a very good geologist. He mapped the rocks that held the dinosaur fossils and could tell that they had formed in rivers—thick sequences of sandstones and mudstones that were deposited either in the channels or off to the side when the rivers flooded. Underneath these rocks were other layers that came from the ocean—fine clays and shales bursting with microscopic plankton fossils. Tracing out the aerial extent of the river rocks and scrutinizing the contacts between the river and ocean layers, Nopcsa realized that his estate used to be part of an island, which emerged from the water some time during the latest Cretaceous. The mini-dinosaurs were living on a small bit of turf, probably around thirty thousand square miles (eighty thousand square kilometers) in area, about the size of Hispaniola.

  Maybe, Nopcsa conjectured, the dinosaurs were small because of their island habitat. It stemmed from an idea that some biologists of the time were beginning to entertain, based on studies of modern species living on islands and the discovery of some strange small mammal fossils in the middle of the Mediterranean. This theory held that islands are akin to laboratories of evolution, where some of the normal rules that govern larger landmasses break down. Islands are remote, so it is always a little bit random as to which species can make their way out to them, being carried by the wind or rafting in on floating logs. There is less space on islands, so fewer resources, so some species may not be able to get so big. And, because islands are severed from the mainland, their plants and animals can evolve in splendid isolation, their DNA cut off from that of their continental cousins, each inbred island-living generation becoming more different, more peculiar over time. This, Nopcsa, thought, is why his island-dwelling dinosaurs were so tiny, so funny looking.

  Later research showed that Nopcsa was correct, and his dwarf dinosaurs are now regarded as a prime example of the “island effect” in action. Otherwise, fate wasn’t so kind to the baron. Austria-Hungry was on the losing side in the Great War, and Transylvania was handed over to one of the winners, Romania. Nopcsa lost his lands and his castle, and a senseless attempt to reclaim his estate ended with him getting pummeled by a gang of peasants and left for dead by the side of the road. With little money to support his lavish lifestyle, Nopcsa grudgingly accepted the directorship of the Hungarian Geological Institute in Budapest, but bureaucratic life was not for him, so he quit. He sold off his fossils and moved to Vienna with Doda, destitute and overcome with a melancholy that we would probably today recognize as depression. Eventually he had enough. In April 1933, the erstwhile baron slipped some sedative into his lover’s tea. When Doda drifted off to sleep, Nopcsa put a bullet into him, then turned the gun on himself.

  Nopcsa’s tragic demise left one mystery. The baron had cracked the riddle of the island dinosaurs, and he knew why they were small, but almost every bone he found—whether sauropod, duckbill, or armored ankylosaur—came from a plant-eater. He had little clue as to what predators prowled his miniature menagerie. Were there freakish versions of tyrannosaurs or carcharodontosaurs that ruled the island, perhaps ones that skipped over from the continents? Other types of meat-eaters, also of diminutive stature? Or maybe there were no carnivores at all—the herbivores able to shrink in size because there was nothing out there hunting them.

  Solving this problem took a century and another remarkable character, a Transylvanian cut from the same cloth as Nopcsa. Mátyás Vremir is also a polymath, a man of many languages, a traveler who sets out for strange lands with little more than his rucksack. He’s never been a spy—as far as I know—but for many years he hopscotched around Africa, working on oil rigs and scouting new drill sites. Now he runs his own company in his native city of Cluj-Napoca, doing environmental surveys and geological consulting on building projects. He’s also into many other things: skiing and exploring caves in the Carpathians, canoeing the Danube Delta, and rock climbing, often bringing along his wife and two young sons (in this custom, he departs from Nopcsa). Tall and wiry, with the long hair of a rocker and the piercing eyes of a wolf, he has an intense personal code of honor and does not suffer fools gladly—or really, at all—but if he likes and respects you, he will go to war with you. He’s one of my favorite people in the world. If I ever found myself in any real danger, in any godforsaken corner of the planet, he’s the one person whom I would want by my side, a man I know I could trust with my life.

  He has many talents, but what Mátyás does best is find dinosaurs. Along with my friend Grzegorz from Poland, who found all of those footprints of the first dinosauromorphs, Mátyás has the best nose for fossils of anybody I’ve ever known. And he seems to do it so effortlessly; when we’re together in Romania, me all festooned in my pricey field gear and Mátyás strolling along in his board shorts, cigarette dangling from his lips, it’s always he who sees the good fossils. But it isn’t really that easy. Mátyás is in fact ruthless: when on the scent of fossils, he’ll wade into frigid rivers in the Romanian winter, abseil down hundred-foot cliffs, or contort himself into the tightest and deepest of caves. Once I saw him push his way through rapids on a broken foot because he saw a bone sticking out of the opposite riverbank.

  At that very same river, in autumn 2009, Mátyás made the most important discovery of his life. He was out prospecting with his boys when he saw some chalk-white lumps poking out from the rusty red rocks on the bank a few feet above the waterline. Bones. He took out his tools and scratched into the soft mudrock, and more kept coming: the limbs and torso of a poodle-size critter. Excitement quickly turned to fear: the local power station would soon be discharging a surge of water into the river, and the rising currents would probably wash away the bones. So Mátyás worked quickly, but with the precision of a surgeon, and cut the skeleton out of its 69-million-year-old tomb. He brought it back to Cluj-Napoca, made sure it was kept safe in the local museum, and then got down to trying to figure out what it was. He was pretty sure it was a dinosaur, but nothing like it had been found in Transylvania before. Some outside advice would be useful, so Mátyás e-mailed a paleontologist who had excavated and described a great variety of small Late Cretaceous dinosaurs: Mark Norell, the dinosaur curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the guy with Barnum Brown’s old job.

  Like me, Mark gets a lot of random e-mails from people asking him to identify their fossils, which often are nothing more than misshapen rocks or lumps of concrete. But when he opened the e-mail from Mátyás and downloaded the photos that were attached, Mark was gobsmacked. I know because I was there. I was Mark’s PhD student at the time, writing a thesis on theropod dinosaur genealogy and evolution. Mark called me into his office—a stately suite looking out over Central Park—and asked what I thought about the cryptic message he had just received from Romania. We both agreed the bones looked like a theropod’s, and when we did a bit of research, we realized that no good meat-eating dinosaur skeletons had ever been found in Transylvania. Mark replied to Mátyás and they struck up a friendship, and a few months later, the three of us found ourselves together in the February chill of Bucharest.

  We convened in the wood-paneled office of
one of Mátyás’s colleagues, a thirty-something professor named Zoltán Csiki-Sava, who, after the fall of Communism put an end to his forced conscription in Ceaușescu’s army, went to college and became one of Europe’s top dinosaur experts. All of the bones were laid out before us on a table, and it was up to us four to identify them. Seeing the specimen with our own eyes, we had no doubt it was a theropod. Many of its light, delicate bones resembled those of Velociraptor and other lithe, fierce raptor species. It was about the same size as Velociraptor, too, or maybe a tad smaller. But something didn’t quite fit. Mátyás’s dinosaur had four big toes on each foot, the two inner ones bearing huge, sickle-shaped claws. The raptors were famous for their retractable sickle claws—which they used to slash and gut their prey—but they had only one on each foot. Besides, they had only three main toes, not four. We were stuck in a quandary, and it seemed that we might have a new dinosaur on our hands.

  Mátyás Vremir surveying the Red Cliffs in Transylvania, on the lookout for fossils of dwarfed dinosaurs.

  Photo courtesy of the author

  Over the course of the week, we kept studying the bones, measuring and comparing them to the skeletons of other dinosaurs. Finally it dawned on us. This new Romanian theropod was a raptor, but a peculiar one, with extra toes and claws compared to its mainland relatives. This was quite the revelation: while the plant-eating dinosaurs of the ancient Transylvanian island got small, the predators went weird. It wasn’t just the double set of killer claws and the extra toe. The Romanian raptor was stockier than Velociraptor, many of the bones of its arms and legs were fused together, and it had even withered its hand into a conjoined mass of stubby fingers and wristbones. It was a new breed of meat-eating dinosaur, and a few months later we gave it a fitting scientific name: Balaur bondoc; the first word is an archaic Romanian term for dragon and the second means “stocky.”